Abstract #1117

Haacke E, Meda S, Latif Z, Govindarajan K, Benson R

BOLD functional MRI (fMRI) has usefulness in presurgical planning of lesions. The goal here is to map important functional cortex (e.g. motor, language and memory) in the area of the resection to minimize postoperative deficits. The clinical standards are invasive and have limitations. We try to evaluate the reliability of some of the essentially used fMRI paradigms. We use data from 4 patients on blocked design paradigms designed to look into language activation. A ROI based approach is taken to separate activated clusters from group averaged t-maps and we use a count of suprathreshold voxels to assess activation on individual t-maps for these clusters. Plots showing a percentage ratio of this activation depict the reliability of language paradigms used in fMRI. Further evaluation would yield substantial evidence to make progress in proving the clinical utility of fMRI.